Ontario’s wide-eyed government forgets that when you’re dealing with casinos, the house always wins.

Alan Feldman, Senior vice-president of Public Affairs from MGM and Wayne Barwise, executive vice-president of development with Cadillac Fairview as MGM held a presser March 6 to outline its plans for a casino complex at Exhibition grounds in Toronto.

In the world of gambling, promises come cheap and hope springs eternal.

Do you need more money for rapid transit? The casino will provide. Health care? Casinos will cover that, too.

Don’t sweat the details of how all of this can happen. When you’re having fun Las Vegas-style, details don’t matter.

Just sit back, spin the slots and wait for the icons to line up.

Almost everything about the OLG’s master plan for Ontario gambling is absurd.

It promised to make lottery operations more efficient by privatizing them. But, as the Star’s Rob Benzie reports, it now finds it can generate sufficient interest only by offering public subsidies to private firms willing to bid.

I would call that weirdly perverse. The OLG, I reckon, would call it a comp.

You or I might focus on expanding the profitable part of the business. Not the OLG. It is shutting down profitable racetrack slots so as to concentrate them in its money-losing casinos.

In the process, it has dealt a body blow to the horse-racing industry in Ontario, an industry that employs between 20,000 and 30,000 full-time.

Don’t worry, says the OLG. It and its casino friends promise new jobs. But when you look closely, those jobs dissolve into the haze.

A 2012 study commissioned by Toronto concluded that when all spin-offs are included a casino would create the equivalent of between 18,000 and 20,000 full-time jobs in the city.

But as that study noted in its fine print, these estimates didn’t take into account any jobs that might be lost or displaced.

Yet job loss and displacement is exactly what we can expect, another study done by the University of Toronto’s Martin Prosperity Institute pointed out this month,

A casino hotel offering cut-rate rooms will reduce business at existing hotels. Casino construction will siphon jobs from and thus delay other projects.

As to casino jobs themselves, the Martin study points out that most are part-time and few are well paid, with an average wage of about $25,000.

Benefits to the city? The Martin study cites research that shows that when everything (including policing) is taken into account, the costs associated with casinos are between two and seven times larger than any benefits received.

But that is reality and in the world of casino, reality does not matter. Only dreams do.

Casino boosters hosted a job fair in Toronto last week. But they offered no jobs. Instead they offered the dream of jobs.

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